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The truth behind Liz Cambage’s exit

<p dir="ltr">Former Opals captain Jenna O'Hea has revealed the details behind the comment that forced Liz Cambage to leave the basketball team. </p> <p dir="ltr">Cambage pulled out of the Tokyo 2021 Olympics after citing mental health reasons which allegedly occurred during training. </p> <p dir="ltr">She had also allegedly told Nigerian players to “go back to their third world country” following a fight in July last year.</p> <p dir="ltr">Speaking to Offsiders host Kellie Underwood, O’Hea confirmed the exact details that occurred which saw Cambage leave. </p> <p dir="ltr">“That is all 100 per cent correct,” O’Hea confirmed. </p> <p dir="ltr">However, O’Hea asked the media to focus on the players who are dedicating their effort to represent Australia. </p> <p dir="ltr">“Everyone has done more than enough (to try and keep Cambage playing for Australia). We have sacrificed a lot to try and keep her in the program. You know, she doesn’t want to be here anymore and that’s her choice and we need to move on without her.”</p> <p dir="ltr">She concluded that Cambage would not play for Australia ever again and said she tried to show her the support she needed. </p> <p dir="ltr">Following O’Hea revelations, Cambage responded by tweeting: “The truth will always come to light, and it ain’t even dawn yet.”</p> <p dir="ltr">After allegedly making the comment last year, Cambage made an Instagram video calling out the “fake news and the lies”.</p> <p dir="ltr">“I’m pretty annoyed at all the fake news and the lies I’m seeing floating around in news articles and being shown and being asked about,” she said.</p> <p dir="ltr">“Yeah, things got heated in the Nigeria game. There was a physical altercation and there were words exchanged but I’m hearing things that aren’t true at all, flying around from people in Australia and America which is crazy.</p> <p dir="ltr">“Everything that happened and everything that was said is on film. I know what happened and I do not appreciate the lies and people constantly trying to tear me down. Hating on me won’t bring you love, at all.”</p> <p dir="ltr"><em>Image: Instagram</em></p>

News

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Discover the delights of rural Queensland

<p>WYZA<sup>®</sup><span> </span>reader Phil Hawkes shares his experience of exploring outback Queensland - from Quilpie to Eromanga.</p> <p><strong>"There’s nothing to do in Quilpie!"</strong></p> <p>That’s what several friends who have been outback all the way to<span> </span><a rel="noopener" href="http://www.queensland.com/en-us/destination%20information/birdsville" target="_blank"><span>Birdsville</span></a><span> </span>and beyond, said when I told them my plans for a road trip from Brisbane. “It’s a boring highway getting to<span> </span><a rel="noopener" href="http://www.queensland.com/en-us/destination%20information/quilpie" target="_blank"><span>Quilpie</span></a><span> </span>and there’s nothing exciting happening except for the counter teas at the old Imperial Hotel,” they added.</p> <p>That seemed to be the sum of their own experience, not too promising. Nevertheless we decided to give it a go and the result was anything but dull. If you throw nearby Eromanga and then Windorah into the mix, there’s so much to see and do in that area that we’d willingly go back again.</p> <p>First, Quilpie, which locals describes as “Simply Unique”. That may be a stretch but this small town in the Channel Country has a definite friendly vibe and all the essential services for the traveller. There’s even a couple of coffee shops with good coffee, which is a pleasant surprise if you’ve been drinking only Nescafe in your caravan!</p> <p>Quilpie is famous for its boulder opal mining industry and there’s a beautiful altar at St. Finbarr’s Church made from a collage of boulder opals. You can also go fossicking and maybe get lucky. It’s a fun thing to do and a good reason to stay around for a few days.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><em><img src="https://cdn.wyza.com.au/media/341363/opal-alta-at-st-finbarrs-quilpie_500x333.jpg" alt="Opal -Alta -at -St -Finbarrs -Quilpie" width="500" height="333" /><br />The altar at St Finbarrs is covered with stunning opals</em></p> <p>The Heritage Hotel in the main street is being painstakingly restored by owner Troy Minnett who also runs the nearby caravan park. The hotel rooms are comfortable with aircon, flat TV and a decent shower, and there’s a convivial bar as well as a wide verandah overlooking the street. Troy can also book you on an Eromanga Tour to see the dinosaur fossils, or on one of two mail runs to see the “real outback”. Highly recommended.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://cdn.wyza.com.au/media/341319/phil-hawkes-blady-top-wyza-com-au_500x333.jpg" alt="Phil -hawkes -blady -top -wyza -com -au" width="500" height="333" /><br /><em>Phil Hawkes hit the road to explore something different from the typical Queensland landscape<br /></em></p> <p><a rel="noopener" href="http://flyingarts.org.au/gallery-location/quilpie-museum-gallery-visitor-information-centre/" target="_blank"><span>The Quilpie Visitor Information Centre, Gallery and Museum</span></a><span> </span>has daily town tours which take you to Baldy Top lookout and Lake Houdraman with its abundant bird life. Upcoming events include the Polocrosse Carnival 25-26 June; the Quilpie Fringe Festival 1-2 July; and the Quilpie Show and Rodeo on 10 September. Troy says that visitors often stop in Quilpie for a night or two and then stay for a week. There is plenty to do!</p> <p>Next,<span> </span><a rel="noopener" href="http://www.australianexplorer.com/eromanga.htm" target="_blank"><span>Eromanga</span></a>. It’s just 108 kms from Quilpie and has suddenly become famous because of an extraordinary find. . . dinosaur fossils from 95-98 million years ago. These include the bones of the biggest dinosaur yet discovered in Australia, a Titanosaur named Cooper after his final resting place in the Cooper Basin.</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="https://cdn.wyza.com.au/media/341320/phil-hawkes-royal-hotel-wyza-com-au_500x333.jpg" alt="Phil -hawkes -royal -hotel -wyza -com -au" width="500" height="333" /><br /><em>The Royal Hotel in Eromanga holds a rustic charm<br /></em></p> <p>To add to the prehistoric mystery, at nearby Eulo there have been discoveries of megasaurs, large creatures such as Kenny the Diprotodon. These are all displayed in a brand new building, the Eromanga Natural History Museum which is an absolute must if you’re out that way. Robyn Mackenzie, whose son made the first dinosaur discovery, is extremely knowledgeable and together with her passionate staff will enthral you with a guided tour.</p> <p style="text-align: left;">In Eromanga there’s also the fascinating Natural History Centre and also the Royal Hotel for a counter lunch with the chance to meet colourful locals such as “Giggles” who is an opal miner and a great storyteller. Eromanga is a real outback gem.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://cdn.wyza.com.au/media/341321/phil-hawkes-giggles-wyza-com-au_500x333.jpg" alt="Phil -hawkes -giggles -wyza -com -au" width="500" height="333" /><br /><em> 'Giggles' is an opal miner and one of the friendly locals in Eromanga</em></p> <p>Last stop on the mostly unsealed road to Birdsville is<span> </span><a rel="noopener" href="http://www.queensland.com/en-us/destination%20information/windorah" target="_blank"><span>Windorah</span></a><span> </span>another friendly, meet-the-locals kind of place. The Western Star Hotel is the social hub of the district and you’re welcome to introduce yourself to locals such as station owners and workers, a teacher, the local cop, an Indigenous elder and various blow-ins over lunch or if you’re lucky, an evening BBQ with excellent food.</p> <p>The Western Star has comfortable motel-style rooms and a camping area, and has won the “Best Outback Hotel” award for the last two years. Managers Marilyn and Ian Simpson exemplify true outback hospitality.</p> <p>Maureen and Helen at the Visitor Information Centre can arrange for local tours around Cooper’s Creek and the red sandhills, or get Jeff to take you out yabbying.</p> <p>And the Outback Store opposite the pub sells the best home-made relishes and preserves you’ll find anywhere. We tried Kim’s tomato relish and it’s almost worth a trip back to Windorah to get some more.<em><br /></em></p> <p>Seeing this beautiful part of the country has given us a taste of the real outback and we’re already thinking about the next trip, and the characters we’ll meet - including Cooper and Kenny.</p> <p><em>Written by Phil Hawkes. Republished with permission of </em><a href="https://www.wyza.com.au/articles/travel/discover-the-delights-of-rural-queensland.aspx"><em>Wyza.com.au</em></a><em>. </em></p>

Domestic Travel

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Why this town is the opal of the Aussie dessert

<p>Coober Pedy is a different world.</p> <p>In fact, it looks so much like a far-off desert planet that it has stood in for Mars in a series of Hollywood blockbusters. The pink sandstone formations rising out of the red dirt, framed by a sapphire blue sky, create an ethereal beauty easily mistaken for outer space.</p> <p>Dotted around the 100-year-old mining town, halfway between Adelaide and Alice Springs, are the abandoned props from those films: a dilapidated spaceship here, paper mache aliens there. The eerie celestial monuments punctuate the red streets alongside discarded mining equipment and weathered opal shop signs.</p> <p>Welcome to the opal capital of the world and the strangest town in Australia.</p> <p>Coober Pedy’s heyday is well behind it and it seems frozen in the 80s – the last opal boom. Mining has declined sharply since the 90s, as the old guard dies off and the town transitions into its new life as an offbeat tourist attraction.</p> <p>But why would tourists travel into the guts of the Australian desert to visit a mining town past its peak? Perhaps to see for themselves the most peculiar part of all, and the thing most Australians know about Coober Pedy: people here live underground.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img width="498" height="245" src="https://oversixtydev.blob.core.windows.net/media/34069/image__498x245.jpg" alt="Image_ (98)"/></p> <p><strong>Digging it</strong></p> <p>It gets hot in Coober Pedy, really hot. The kind of heat that beats down on you, and then blows around you like you’re standing in a convection oven.</p> <p>And it doesn’t make for a lively streetscape. On a 50 degree day – yes, they have those here – the whole town shuts down as people hunker down in “dugouts”.</p> <p>Literally built into the side of the red and white mounds rising out of the otherwise the barren plains, dugouts can be recognised by the thin pipes sprouting from the rocky knolls. They’re for ventilation  and are covered in mesh so snakes don’t drop down into the living room. The wide, older-style air shafts have been phased out because drunk miners used to fall into them walking home from the pub.</p> <p>“The old miners, when they came here, they realised they couldn’t live in a tin shed or a tent because you’d die, it’s too hot,” says miner John Dunstan, who’s been in the opal game for over 50 years.</p> <p>“A lot of the old original dugouts, the miners actually tunnelled down a little drive into their mine and lived in there … later on they started building underground homes and it’s the same principle – just a tunnel going into the hill and then some rooms.”</p> <p><strong>Life underground</strong></p> <p>About 65 per cent of the 1800 to 3000 people in town (much of the population travels, so it’s hard to get an accurate reading) live in dugouts. While many older ones are cramped, narrow spaces that would send a claustrophobic’s heart rate north, most of the modern ones are large, open and styled like any modern home.</p> <p>“We’ve got four different doors you can get out of our place – there’s plenty of light, plenty of windows,” says Mr Dunstan.</p> <p>Walking into a dugout on a 40 degree day, it’s easy to understand exactly why people want to live underground. It’s the kind of heat relief you get walking into an air-conditioned shopping centre: so noticeable that out-of-towners make an audible sigh of relief.</p> <p>Generally, heating or cooling isn’t needed – it stays about 25 degrees during summer scorchers and winter nights when it drops to minus two. It can be 36 degrees at midnight and residents sleep with a doona.</p> <p>The older-style dugouts were built by hand. Explosives tore through rocks and homeowners would then pick and shovel them out. These days, tunnelling machines do the work and businesses trade on building them, although there’s not that much space for new homes – there are only so many rock formations left to carve out.</p> <p>The bedrooms, usually at the back of the house, are so dark that dugout residents keep a torch next to their bed in case of power outages (which happen frequently in summer, thanks to the above-ground residents thrashing their air conditioners). Cool, dark and silent, any Coober Pedian will tell you it’s the best night’s sleep you’ll ever have.</p> <p>“You don’t actually know dark until you’ve been in a dugout at night,” teacher Elyse Kowald says.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img width="498" height="245" src="https://oversixtydev.blob.core.windows.net/media/34070/image__498x245.jpg" alt="Image_ (99)"/></p> <p><strong>It literally pays to renovate in Coober Pedy</strong></p> <p>Everybody here bristles at the suggestion that dugouts are claustrophobic.</p> <p>Real estate agent Misty Mance, of Lin Andrews Real Estate (the only agency in town), regularly sells dugouts and says people quickly fall in love with life underground.</p> <p>“I had a family earlier in the year, when they first came to town their little boy, about three or four, was very scared, he didn’t want to go underground,” she says.</p> <p>“Two months ago they bought a family dugout from me and their kids love it… it was just that initial taking him to friend’s houses, getting him used to being underground, and now the little fella won’t look back.”</p> <p>Ms Mance says real estate has taken a bit of a dip in recent years as the opal boom has wound down. You can pick up a dugout anywhere from $130,000 to $250,000.</p> <p>But houses here can actually make you money. When Mr Dunstan was renovating his home (by digging out new rooms from the side of the rock) he found an $85,000 opal – simply because his wife asked for a pantry.</p> <p>Dugouts actually make better use of space than an above ground home, because if you need to fit a bulky TV cabinet or sofa, you can just blow out a customised hole in the wall.</p> <p><strong>Opal dreams</strong></p> <p>Since 1915, people have been looking for opal in Coober Pedy. After World War II, a flood of European miners came, trying their luck on the opal fields. And you need luck to find opals.</p> <p>Opal mining is so difficult and relies on such chance that companies don’t bother with Coober Pedy. If they tried to mine here, they would go broke. Opal mining is exclusively the domain of hard-working individuals.</p> <p>But the lifetime miners – those who witnessed the town’s booming nightclub and 24-hour restaurant days – have gotten old. And despite a big resurgence in opal prices, due to interest from China and India, they rarely pass the difficult trade down to their kids.</p> <p>“Over the last 20 years, we’ve had hardly any new opal miners coming to town; it’s mainly us older blokes, still hanging on,” says Mr Dunstan. </p> <p>Dimitrois “Jimmy the runner” Nikoloudis, a lifetime miner known to all in town, believes the “golden age of Coober Pedy” mining is long gone.</p> <p>“In my years, the average mining age would have been something like 25 years of age. The average today would probably be 69-70,” Mr Nikoloudis says.</p> <p>“It has become a tourist attraction, about 10 per cent for miners and 90 per cent for the tourists. The mining? It’s just history now, we talk about it.”</p> <p><em>Kirsten Robb travelled to Coober Pedy courtesy of SA Tourism</em></p> <p><em>Written by Kirsten Robb. First appeared on <a href="https://www.domain.com.au/advice/why-coober-pedy-is-the-opal-of-the-australian-desert-20161215-gtbrqe/"><strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Domain.com.au</span></strong></a>.</em></p> <p><strong>Related links:</strong></p> <p><a href="http://www.oversixty.co.nz/travel/international/2016/11/the-strangest-town-in-australia/"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><em><strong>This might be the strangest town in Australia</strong></em></span></a></p> <p><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><em><strong><a href="http://www.oversixty.co.nz/travel/international/2017/02/a-day-in-the-life-of-an-outback-postie/">A day in the life of an outback postie</a></strong></em></span></p> <p><a href="http://www.oversixty.co.nz/travel/international/2016/08/10-free-things-to-do-in-darwin/"><em><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong>10 free things to do in Darwin</strong></span></em></a></p>

International Travel